The choice is between today’s robotic / pathetic age and the old values. The countries that were badly affected by austerity, went back to their basic values, organic farming, living among their family and community in rural (their ancestors) areas enjoying a simple life, etc. Today’s generation have got a choice, the baby boomers had none; they are self-made and went through real hardship. Read more

As the world is experiencing breakthrtough and destructive technologies almost everyday, tweaking educational syllabus to upgrade skills and form 'attitude to tackle everchanging technology' and lifeStyle at school and colleges can impact the youth to accept challenge in any form! Otherwise, once teen phase is over, youth feel very difficult to tackle random changes in everything, pushed by 'internet' communication and faster reactions! Read more

First of all I agree with all the points the author listed making life for the youth very difficult indeed.But there is an even deeper issue affecting young and old alike.We have been so deeply occupied in consumerism, lapping up all the cheap circus and bread entertainment we have been receiving, we got so much used to measuring 'life" based on quantitative growth, GDP figures, stock exchange indexes and the state of financial institutions that we completely forgot about our actual purpose in life.

We created such "zero societies" where except the next weekend party, sports-game, next great shopping sale or an exotic holiday we have no other goals left. We managed to delete everything "humane".Not surprisingly young people today do not have any desire to establish their own families, have childrenAnd they are more than content to connect virtually send each others selfies or smilies, or severe any contact as it happens in many "developed" countries.

And this purposeless existence is killing us much more than any of the above "economic", "corporeal" problems.I would even say that if we rediscovered how "life" is happening, flowing in between people, within proper mutually supportive, mutually complementing collaboration we could easily solve all other problems we have within a very short time.We need urgent changes in education, in the values of society, in the "general propaganda" brainwashing people before it is too late and we all sleepwalk into some irreversible darkness, barbarism it would take much longer to find our way out of. Read more

I agree with both you and Curtis Carpenter (born in 1957, I too am a child of the 60s. However, I do have children, the youngest 11--and I do love them and care about the other children of this world.

Whatever devotion we have shown in our nuclear families, as a generation we have been very irresponsible to the generation of our children. We have bequeathed them a doomsday scenario natural planet, a civilization whose highest values and purpose are every bit of bullying gossip and perverse sexual diversion we can scrape out of the sewer. The only ones that seem to claim values worth dying for is ISIS--and a lot of youth pick up that message--God help us all!

I don't know that we can yet fully steer away from catastrophe, but if we've a stitch of decency and responsibility left in us, we can yet minimize the damage in time and extent--for an ultimate recovery. I am reminded in this thought of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. A Dark Ages of tens of thousands of years of chaos and misery approached with the disintegration of an empire decaying outward in like dying through gangrene. But it was a destiny that could be limited to less than a thousand years, with a continuum of civilization filling in the vacuum so that chaos would never be complete. The key was proper planning.

I think we don't need anything as sophisticated as Asimov's fictional science of psycho-history. Further, I think that we can yet accomplish all by mid-century, if we sill it. What it will take is education about our global interdependence, and its atomic dependence on trust and relationship at the immediate human level and up--an extension of behavioral economic theory. From this, we would need to tap into the great consumerist mass-media machine and direct it toward producing a psychological environment promoting voluntary mutual responsibility. This would be the human equivalent of what natural communities do to unify and evolve out of environmental chaotic mess. We must do that, ut on much larger scale. Really though, we don't have to do anything but put this mutual caring network together.

I can guarantee you that not one tube in Alan Turing's WWII computer had the "foggiest notion" about the 1s and 0s passing though them anymore than Prof. Turing or his code-breaking colleagues. Nonetheless in the truest sense of the whole being greater than the sum of the part, those tubes acting as one with the mechanics, broke the German Enigma code. Per best estimates, that ended the war 2 years earlier than otherwise would have been possible even given the success of the Manhattan Project, and saved 14 million lives.

The Humanity Brain, with a unified heart in a true internet, could turn the world situation around in amazing time--and maybe save billions of lives.

Seriously look at the natural world. Look at the creative problem-solving genius of even in the unified combined effort of a bacterial megacolony or the nuclei of a slime mold. Can we begin to grasp the mind of a brain of which we are a mere neuron? But beware, billion of every-man-for-himself neurons in complete "internet" connection are just an entropic tangle and useless... Read more

I certainly agree with your position here. The young need to create a new understanding of what "a life well lived" consists of. My generation failed at doing that in the 60's.

Perhaps today's youth can make less of a mess of it -- but it is going to take an extraordinary act of creativity and will to escape from the hegemony of today's economic paradigm -- before it's too late. Read more

Yep. But the treatment of youth is deliberate policy. There has been a steady upwards trend with youth unemployment for a considerable time. Its driven by the ageing vote at the ballot box who want to hang on to largely unearned privilege. Its an outcome of the democratic system, as incidentally is the monumental debt and overpriced housing - all present in Western democracies. Basically more have to suffer before the ballot box swings

Soon young people will start to realize that their enemy is the Pisani-Ferry's of this world, that try to control them by instilling fear while contributing for the situation we are in.

Instead of advocating for less inequality, they promote it with the so called structural reforms, that aimed at reducing the social welfare state and decrease wages.

They use fear to impose measures that make no sense, based on lies that defy any evidence and old economic theories long time ago refuted.

The advocate such things has mercantilism (trade surplus) Fayolism (precarization of work) Colonialism (gold standards and captive markets) Malthusianism (secular stagnation) and the destruction of the social security nets...

They haven't moved an inch since the 19th century conservatives and now have the nerve to address the youth? Read more

1)"The respite gained by the older generations will have to be paid for by the younger ones." The younger generation also benefits from better life conditions, access to potable sources of water, better quality of air, etc and many of the advances they will have at theire disposal.

2)Its absurd to foresee a future where interest rates and inflation remain at the ZLB, that's not the normality. Economies will start growing (they have the bad habit of doing so) and budgets will balance out, like they normally do. Adds that debt repayments are also done to the future generations, so its not the case of the future paying to the past..

3) Pensions are not determined by demographics and number of people but by the total wages in an economy. So has long has the total wages of the future generations continued to grow, pensions are secured. The goods for the elders have to be produced, so if there are less workers, wages will grow and accommodate the lower number of people working.

4) I agree with the 4th, but not only young people have it harder, but old people also are losing privileges conquered in the last centuries. If they want to change their life they have to start making more noise and demand for better conditions. Nobody is going to give them without a fight... Read more

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